Pantech has designed some sharp-looking handsets over the past few years. The latest to cross our test bench, the Laser, is one of the company's best, thanks to its impressively slim form factor. But like with many other recent feature phones on AT&T, the required $20-per-month data plan means that you can get real smartphone for the same price, both up-front and per month. That makes the Laser a tougher sell than it should have been.

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Design, Keyboard, and Call Quality
The Laser is made entirely of dark blue, black, and grey plastic. Textured matte finishes look sharp and make the Laser feel more expensive than it is. The phone measures just 4.5 by 2.8 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.6 ounces. The 0.4 (actually 0.39)-inch depth measurement is the slimmest I've ever seen for a handset with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It's a good keyboard, too, with four rows, a sensible arrangement, and large, flat keys that were fine for fast typing. The 3.1-inch LCD is another winner. It sports a very sharp 480-by-800-pixel resolution, with beautiful, vibrant colors. It's of the older plastic resistive variety, but it was sufficiently responsive. Dialing numbers felt accurate and fast, with well-tuned haptic feedback.

The Laser is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSDPA (850/1900 MHz) device, meaning that it can hit 3G data speeds in the U.S. but just 2G speeds overseas. There's no Wi-Fi. Voice quality was quite good, with a clear, full tone in the earpiece. Transmissions were static free, and wind rejection was average. Reception was a little weak; I heard some dropouts and computery-sounding syllables that I usually don't hear on other AT&T phones in the same test area, though the Laser didn't actually drop any calls during the review period. Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. But there's no voice dialing, Bluetooth or otherwise, which is a disappointment. The speakerphone wasn't the worst I've heard, but it was too tinny and quiet for use outdoors. Battery life was average at 5 hours and 5 minutes of talk time.

User Interface and Apps
The home screen features a beautifully-animated mechanical clock, complete with turning gears. The handset felt faster and more responsive than other recent feature phones I've tested, and I liked the colorful icon layouts and the three home screen panels. The Opera Mini Web browser served up quality Web pages on the high-res screen. But pages loaded slowly over 3G, and clicking on the tiny individual page elements was a little tough. The TeleNav-powered AT&T Navigator offers crisp, voice-enabled GPS directions for $10-per-month, and there's a 30-day free trial.

Sadly, the Laser is buried in bloatware, with icon after icon of extra-cost services and surprise shortcuts to AT&T's awful Media Mall portal. The Facebook, MySpace and Twitter icons aren't even apps - they're just links to WAP sites. Icons that look safe, like AT&T Music, take forever to load, pop up numerous warnings about data charges, and require a $4.99-per-month fee after three days. No one needs separate icons for Video, Mobile Video, App Center, Applications, and My Stuff, along with extra "Shop" menu choices one level down. Buy a smartphone, and you won't have to deal with monthly charges for middling apps like Where, which pale in comparison to what's available for free in Android Market or Apple's App Store.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The microUSB headphone jack makes finding third-party earbuds a pain, and good-sounding ones almost impossible. Sadly, the microSD card slot is buried underneath the back panel; you have to pull the battery cover and battery to swap cards. My 16GB SanDisk card worked fine, and there's 108MB of free internal memory. Cueing up music tracks on the card took many extra steps, but music sounded clear and punchy over Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones. I liked the "spinning disc" album art graphics. Standalone videos looked super sharp and smooth in full screen mode, though the Laser wouldn't play 720p HD video files.

The 3-megapixel camera has no flash or auto-focus. Test photos had too much contrast and were overexposed. Outdoor shots were OK, but indoor photos were either a pasty mess (in brightly lit rooms) or a noisy, colorless shadow (in darker rooms). Recorded videos were reasonably high-res at 640-by-480 and 15 frames per second, but had the same problem: brightly lit rooms looked black and white, while darker rooms were lost in inky blackness.

There's one scenario where the Laser is a bargain: for teens who do a massive amount of messaging, but don't browse the Web, e-mail, or use apps much. For them, AT&T's weird texting-phone plan comes out to less per month than a smartphone plan would. But for the vast majority of people, AT&T's texting phones are priced essentially the same as smartphones.

Since AT&T has priced the Laser like a smartphone, let's compare it to some. The Apple iPhone 3GS ($99, 4.5 stars) costs the same upfront, but is a much better multimedia device and has Apple's stellar, 300,000-app store. E-mail, IM, and Web browsing are included in the iPhone's $15 and $25 data plans, though texting is still extra. But the iPhone 3GS lacks the Laser's higher-resolution screen and hardware keyboard (the iPhone 4 solves the first problem but costs $100 more up front). If you'd rather have a keyboard, consider an affordable Palm Pre Plus ($49.99, 3.5 stars), which brings a much better media experience than the Laser's and some very nice apps to the table. Finally, voice-focused callers should grab the Samsung Rugby II ($99.99, 4 stars), a rugged handset with great call quality and no required data plan.

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Jamie Lendino is the Editor-In-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor In Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also appeared in the print editions of Popular Science, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision,...
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